In the Autumn of 1940 the Jews of Warsaw were forced into a crowded ghetto, enduring unimaginable conditions until most were killed. Yet, amid this, one man, Emanuel Ringelblum, started an extraordinary clandestine organization dedicated to recording life under Nazi occupation. His aim: to ensure that, if he died, his people's history would still be written.

Codenamed Oyneg Shabes, this underground group painstakingly gathered together an archive of some 35,000 documents - letters, poems, photographs, personal testimonies, menus, sketches, songs and official papers - which was buried in tin boxes and milk bottles just before the ghetto was razed to the ground. This secret cache lay deep beneath the rubble for years, long after most of the Oyneg Shabes's members had perished, until one of the few survivors led the way to its secret location.

Only now can the story of this incredible historical record, and the people behind it, be fully told. It is a testament to an extraordinary act of defiance in the face of tyranny, and to the triumph of history.

'This may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read'
The New Republic

What inspired you to write about the Oyneg Shabes?
Years ago , as I read the last wills and testaments of the teacher Israel Lichtenstein and two teenaged helpers who buried the first cache of the Oyneg Shabes archive in August 1942, I realized just how vital it was for these Jews, sentenced to death, to write and to leave time capsules buried in the earth. As they stuffed documents into those tin boxes , the SS was rounding up Jews just a few yards away. When the Germans came too close, they would finish their testaments, and as the SS would go away, they would go back to them and add a few more lines. Lichtenstein wrote about his wife, about his 20 month-old daughter Margalit, and told whomever would find his writings in the future that he put his whole soul into the archive; he did not want praise, but he hoped that he, his wife and daughter, and the dying Jews would be remembered. I was very moved by that, and began to read more about this extraordinary project, begun by a fellow historian, Emanuel Ringelblum.

How long have you been working on the book? How did you find the process?
I have been working on this since 1996. The process was very difficult. How do you write about an archive whose work was cut off so brutally, whose members were almost all murdered and who wrote so little about themselves? There were tough organizational problems, many dead ends, and there were many times when I became quite discouraged.

Work on the book also raised many personal issues. I was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, and came to the United States in 1949, when I was a very young child. Our parents socialized with other Holocaust survivors, I grew up speaking both Yiddish and English, and as we got older, we—I mean the children in this survivor community—became aware of the silences, of a kind of abyss that bounded our parents lives. Little by little we learned more; that this parent had had a family before the war, that someone else had had to choke their infant child to death to protect a hideout.

To make a long story short, what I found out as I researched the book cut very close to the bone. For most of my professional life I tried to stay away from the topic of the Holocaust and therefore began my career as a Russian historian who wrote about liberalism and universities in Imperial Russia. But as time went on I became quite upset about many facile judgments made about Jewish behavior during the Holocaust. After my parents passed away I understood even more that those historians who understood the world and culture of the dwindling number of survivors had an obligation to tell the story of Jewish life under Nazi occupation. I asked myself, what options did they have, what could they have done differently?

When did you first hear about the Oyneg Shabes archives?
I heard about it when I was a teenager. I then read John Hersey's THE WALL and that piqued my interest even more. What a project! Sixty people, famous and obscure, Rabbis and Communists, men and women, who work together for three years on a highly dangerous mission of testimony and preservation. They collected everything: candy wrappers, tram tickets, children’s note books, menus from restaurants. They risked their lives to interview refugees infected with typhus, a highly contagious illness with a 50% death rate in those conditions. They recorded the stories of the first escapees from the death camps and sent them to London. And even though they faced death every day, they kept on writing and recording. And the Gestapo never learned the secret!

Was there any piece in the archives that affected you the most?
Everything affected me. If there was anything in particular I would have to say the children’s testimonies and the testimonies about dying children. For example in September 1942 one of the Oyneg Shabes workers noted a scene in the “cauldron”, a massive selection where 100,000 Jews had to pass by the SS who sent most to Treblinka and a few back to the ghetto:

“The impression left by this registration was terrible and was symbolized by one and two year old children sitting on a sofa in the middle of the road and crying ‘mama’ while Jews, their hearts bleeding, were passing by, watching the horrible scene and crying. The Germans had probably done it deliberately. They could have taken the children away but they did not. On the contrary-let the Jews see and grieve”

That same day the Germans realized that some parents were drugging their small children and trying to slip them through the selection in large knapsacks. At that point they began to routinely stick a bayonet into every knapsack.

Did you have family involved in WW2? Did their stories have an impact on this book?
As a child I shared a room with my father’s brother, who had broken into a panicked run with his wife and two children when they saw a car full of police coming to arrest them in their mill in rural Belarus. One he survived the hail of bullets, and he never forgave himself for not having grabbed his children as he ran. As an eight year old, I was the same age as his daughter when she was killed. He kept telling me these terrible stories over and over again. There was no “happy ending: for him, no “Schindler’s List-like” story of redemption, survival and rebuilding.

Many years after that I learned that my mother, who was 19 years old in 1942, had been publically flogged by the local police chief(non-German) after she resisted his advances. In June 1942 she was among the survivors of an Einsatzgruppe massacre of the Jews in Szarkowszczyzna, then in Poland and now in Belarus. As she ran, a killer stepped in front of her and fired his rifle but the gun jammed. A week later she wandered into a second ghetto, in Glebokie, where a young Polish boy, Piot Bilewicz, risked his life to get her out. (She did not want to leave her mother, but her mother literally pushed her away to save her life. That was the last time she ever saw her.) After some months on the Bilewicz farm, they were denounced and my mother fled into the forests where she joined the partisans and had many more adventures. By the way, in 1998 Yad Vashem bestowed on Bilewicz the well-deserved title of “Righteous Gentile.”

As I grew older I heard some other stories that affected me. One concerned my mother’s younger sister Slava, today Slava Fintel, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida. When the Germans began a new massacre in November 1942, Slava, now in the Postawy ghetto, was 11 years old. The Germans shot my mother’s two older sisters along with their small children and my grandmother. Slava stayed near my dying grandmother and refused to hear her pleas to run. The Germans shot her, but she was only grazed and played dead. Slava then crawled, badly wounded, fifteen miles to the Bilewicz farm, where she was miraculously nursed back to health. In 1996 my sisters and I joined Slava’s family as we retraced that route in a car. We couldn’t believe how a wounded child could do it!

My father’s sister Mina was in a ditch with 2500 murdered Jews in Glebokie in June 1942. She too survived. Her two children, my first cousins, live in the US.

By the way my father was “lucky.” When the Soviets arrested him in 1941 and sent him to the Gulag, everybody pitied him. But those whom the Soviets deported were more fortunate than those who stayed.

So now, after many decades, I feel that maybe because of all these miracles of survival, I owe some kind of a debt, which I can in part repay by telling this story.

It's a very sad but inspiring story. What do you think the legacy of the Oyneg Shabes will be?
The legacy of the Oyneg Shabes, hopefully, will be to remind people that the Jews were not passive, faceless victims but members of a proud and resilient people whose culture and heritage began long before 1939. In particular I hope that readers come to understand how the creative culture of pre-war Polish Jewry shaped Jewish responses to catastrophe. The Germans thought that they would win the war, that they would control the documents and that they would decide how posterity would remember the Jews. Nazi propaganda would portray a picture of Jews as sub-human vermin. But Jews in the ghettos and in the camps believed that Hitler would lose the war, even if they did not live to see it. And so they left time capsules, buried documents, in the hope that some day, in a better world, people would discover them and remember the Jews on the basis of Jewish, and not Nazi documents. Guns and bullets were one way of fighting back. But one could also fight with pen and paper.